After her time on ‘The Bachelor,’ Madison Prewett found love with Grant Troutt. Here’s everything to know about their marriage and life together.
After her time on ‘The Bachelor,’ Madison Prewett found love with Grant Troutt. Here’s everything to know about their marriage and life together.
The European Commission has fined Elon Musk’s X €120 million (around $140 million) for breaching its transparency rules under the Digital Services Act. The European Union’s executive arm announced that it was investigating the social media company’s blue checkmarking verification system — first introduced when it was still known as Twitter — last year, along with other alleged DSA violations. Today’s verdict concerns the “deceptive design” of the checkmark, as well as “the lack of transparency of [X’s] advertising repository, and the failure to provide access to public data for researchers.”
The Commission’s issue with X’s verification system is that where blue checkmarks were once something that Twitter that Twitter vetted, they can now be bough by anyone. According to the EU, this puts users at risk of scams and impersonation fraud, as they can’t tell if the accounts they’re engaging with are authentic. “While the DSA does not mandate user verification, it clearly prohibits online platforms from falsely claiming that users have been verified, when no such verification took place,” it wrote in a statement.
The EU has also ruled that X’s advertisement repository employs “design features and access barriers” that make it difficult for good faith actors and the general public to determine the source of online ads and spot scams or threat campaigns. It says that X fails to provide information pertaining to both the content of an ad and the entity paying for its placement.
The third alleged infringement concerns the public data that companies are required by the DSA to make available to qualifying researchers. The European Commission claims that X’s practices in this area are unnecessarily prohibitive, therefore “effectively undermining research into several systemic risks in the European Union.”
X has 60 working days to respond to the EU’s non-compliance decision — the first of its nature — on blue checkmarks, and 90 days to submit an “action plan” of how it will address the alleged breaches relating to its advertising repository and access to public data. Failure to comply could result in financial penalties.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/x-hit-with-140-million-fine-from-the-eu-161259324.html?src=rss
Meta has cut several deals with news publishers to help provide real-time data for its AI chatbot services, as reported by Axios. The commercial agreements will allow its Meta AI chatbots to better answer user queries about news and current events.
These are multiyear deals where publishers will be compensated for the use of their content, but we don’t have any monetary specifics. The contracts do stipulate that Meta’s chatbots will link out to articles when answering news queries, potentially offering a slight traffic boost to publishers.
The news partners include USA Today, People, Le Monde and CNN. However, there are also a whole lot of conservative outlets included in today’s announcement, such as Fox News, The Daily Caller and Washington Examiner. It’s a good thing Meta’s AI will provide the aforementioned links, just in case a chatbot says something crazy about whatever nonsense culture war topic is going on that day.
Meta has announced that this is just a first step and that it will be adding more news partners to cover more topics in the future. This is an interesting move because Meta has long-been averse to paying news companies for access to content. It stopped paying US publishers for access to news in 2022 and the Facebook news tab went away entirely last year.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/meta-cuts-deals-with-several-news-publishers-for-ai-use-163404107.html?src=rss
The FIFA World Cup Draw is on December 5! Here are your viewing options to tune into the event.
The FIFA World Cup Draw is on December 5! Here are your viewing options to tune into the event.
Another CES is nearly upon us, another year where we’ll see new gadgets aplenty from giant companies and tiny ones you’ve never heard of. And the not-so-secret secret of CES is that many of these things never make it to market — but usually it isn’t things companies like Samsung show off. But here we are, nearly six years since Samsung first showed off its Ballie personal robot and it is nowhere to be found.
For those who may not recall, Ballie is an adorable circular robot that can putter around your house and project things onto the floor and wall. It’s kind of a virtual assistant on the go. Samsung first revealed this tiny robot at CES 2020, but it was more of a prototype than something anyone expected to purchase. And then there was a global pandemic and we all sort of forgot about weird ball-shaped robots for a few. But Samsung triumphantly unveiled a larger and more refined Ballie at CES 2024, saying it would be on sale that year!
Well, that didn’t happen, but a year later Ballie was back at CES again. Samsung promised it would go on sale in 2025, and followed up with a press release this past April saying it was on track for a summer launch in Korea and the US. As far as I can tell, that’s the last we’ve heard of it.
But with CES looming again, I can’t help but feel like Samsung will roll Ballie out once more, trying to sell the dream of a cute robotic companion who just gets you. I spent some time watching Ballie do its thing in a carefully controlled demo at CES 2024, and I can’t say I was overwhelmed by its purported usefulness or thought there’d be much of a market for this thing. I now can’t help but wonder if Samsung has data backs up my intuition. If this thing was going to sell like gangbusters, it likely wouldn’t be subjected to such a long and public gestation period.
It reminds me a little of one of my favorite Samsung gaffes, the Galaxy Home smart speaker. It was announced at a time when Apple and Google were challenging Sonos and Amazon with voice-activated speakers of their own, moving Siri or the Google Assistant from your phone to a more omnipresent place in your home.
The first rumor of the Galaxy Home happened way back in 2017, and the speaker was officially revealed and briefly shown off by Samsung in August of 2018. My immediate reaction was that this product made very little sense for both Samsung and potential customers — Bibxy sucked, and there were plenty of speakers with better voice assistants. Apparently, Samsung agreed. After multiple years of vague commitments and references to the Galaxy Home, Samsung just… stopped talking about it. Oddly enough, a Galaxy Home Mini speaker was briefly released in South Korea, part of a promotion for people who pre-ordered the Galaxy S20. But I don’t think you could ever just walk into a store and buy one, and the larger Galaxy Home never materialized at all.
Ballie isn’t quite the abandonware situation that the Galaxy Home was, at least not yet. After all, it’s only been about eight months since Samsung dropped that press release claiming it would arrive soon. The company has definitely pushed Ballie in a more public way than the Galaxy Home, making it a little harder to just drop entirely. Maybe we’ll see a revamped Ballie with even more weird tricks next month, or maybe we’ll just get another vague promise that it’ll arrive in 2026. After failing to deliver two years in a row, though, I’m not going to expect Ballie to show up as a real product until I can punch in my credit card and pre-order it… not that I’d do that anyway. Ballie needs to show that it’s a lot more than a cute rolling robot before Samsung gets my cash.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/where-the-hell-is-samsungs-ballie-robot-151112829.html?src=rss
The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune have filed separate lawsuits against Perplexity over alleged copyright infringement. The Times said it had sent Perplexity several cease-and-desist demands to stop using its content until the two reached an agreement, but the AI company persisted in doing so.
In the lawsuit [PDF], the Times accused Perplexity of infringing on its copyrights at two main stages. First, by scraping its website (including in real time) to train AI models and feed content into the likes of the Claude chatbot and Comet browser. Second, in the output of Perplexity’s products, with the Times accusing the company’s generative AI products of often reproducing its articles verbatim. The Times also says Perplexity damaged its brand by falsely attributing completely fabricated information (aka hallucinations) to the newspaper.
The Chicago Tribune also filed a lawsuit against Perplexity for similar reasons. “Perplexity’s genAI products generate outputs that are identical or substantially similar to the Chicago Tribune’s content,” the newspaper claimed in its suit. “Upon information and belief, Perplexity has unlawfully copied millions of copyrighted Chicago Tribune stories, videos, images and other works to power its products and tools.”
These lawsuits are the latest in dozens of legal cases involving copyright holders and AI companies in the US. The Times, for instance, previously sued OpenAI and Microsoft. It accused the companies of training their large language models on millions of its articles without permission. That case is ongoing.
Copyright holders have licensed their content to AI companies in some cases, though. OpenAI has struck multiple deals with media companies. The Times and Amazon reached an agreement this year that’s said to be worth as much as $25 million per year to the media company.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/the-new-york-times-and-chicago-tribune-sue-perplexity-over-alleged-copyright-infringement-153656431.html?src=rss
Now that Netflix has reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, does this mean it will cost more to subscribe to HBO Max?
Now that Netflix has reached a deal to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, does this mean it will cost more to subscribe to HBO Max?
RAM prices have gone wild, mostly thanks to AI. In this episode, Devindra chats with Will Smith (Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod) about the state of the RAM industry, as well as other hardware we expect to get more expensive. (SSD prices are definitely creeping up too!). Also, we discuss Meta poaching Alan Dye, one of Apple’s design executives, and what this could mean for Meta’s upcoming devices. And yes, whatever they have next will likely revolve around AI.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, plans deep cuts to his company’s metaverse development – 1:09
Longtime Apple UI designer Alan Dye to join Meta’s AI division – 7:08
US DOT cuts fuel efficiency standards, doubles down on gas cars – 25:40
Waymo autonomous cars recently started driving more aggressively – 31:30
Amazon halts its anime dub beta because it sounded terrible – 38:00
WTF, RAM?? Will Smith joins to talk about why RAM prices are spiraling upward – 44:05
Around Engadget: Metroid Prime 4 is a return to form after 18 years on ice – 1:04:42
Working on – 1:07:36
Pop culture picks – 1:08:32
Host: Devindra Hardawar
Guest: Will Smith
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/engadget-podcast-wtf-is-up-with-ram-with-will-smith-from-the-tech-pod-141442002.html?src=rss
HBO subscribers are wondering what the Warner Bros-Netflix deal means for them.
HBO subscribers are wondering what the Warner Bros-Netflix deal means for them.
Microsoft’s Copilot+ initiative launched last year with a clear goal: To produce capable laptops for people eagerly anticipating AI-powered features. Read that sentence again, and it’s glaringly obvious that Microsoft’s plan was flawed from the start. Most consumers aren’t nearly as hyped for AI features as the companies eager to foist artificial intelligence upon us. And those features aren’t exactly compelling, either. Microsoft’s Recall — which snaps screenshots of your PC to create a database of everything you’ve done– was dogged by privacy concerns from the start. And to be honest, I haven’t found its ability to remember the files and websites I’ve opened to be that useful.
Without any sort of killer AI app, most consumers weren’t going to pay a premium for Copilot+ systems either. Not in this precarious economy, anyway. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to see sales of Copilot+ systems going practically nowhere over the last year. In the third quarter of 2024, they accounted for less than 10 percent of systems shipped, according to data from Mercury Research (via Tom’s Hardware). The research firm IDC (via PCWorld) also found that Copilot+ systems made up just 2.3 percent of Windows machines sold in the first quarter of 2025 (and a mere 1.9 percent of the entire PC market).
Instead of continuing to promote Copilot+, Microsoft now wants to “make every Windows 11 computer an AI PC“. The new “Hey Copilot” voice commands and Copilot Vision, a feature that lets the AI assistant see what’s on your screen, are both cloud-powered. That means you won’t need the beefy 40 TOPS neural processing units (NPU) found on Copilot+ systems to use them. Microsoft spent the past few years touting NPUs as the gateway to useful AI features, like Recall and Windows Studio webcam effects, but only one of its new AI capabilities actually requires an NPU. (And even that is just a slight update to Click to Do, allowing you to send Zoom invitations by right-clicking on e-mail addresses.)
It’s easy to view the whole Copilot+ initiative as a cynical way to ramp up AI hype and push people towards expensive new laptops, especially as the October 14 Windows 10 end of support date loomed. But it also led to some genuinely useful changes: Microsoft made 16GB of RAM a standard for Copilot+ systems, along with 256GB of storage and the aforementioned 40 TOPS NPUs. The launch of Copilot was also the kick in the pants Microsoft needed to revamp Windows for mobile Arm processors. I never thought I’d love a Surface with a Snapdragon chip, but the improved Arm support on the Surface Pro and this year’s smaller model finally won me over.
The Dell 16 Premium sitting on a ledge.
I wouldn’t call the Copilot+ program a huge swing, but it’s still the sort of industry-wide cat herding that’s rare to see in the PC space. Microsoft couldn’t just snap its fingers and shift all PCs to efficient mobile chips with powerful NPUs, like Apple did with its own jump to M-series chips years ago. Microsoft had to wait for new NPU-equipped hardware from Qualcomm (and eventually Intel and AMD). It had to finally fix the Windows on Arm problem. And it also had to double-down on AI features that felt truly transformative. It’s just a shame that consumers didn’t seem to care.
Microsoft said that Copilot+ systems accounted for 15 percent of premium PCs sold during last year’s holiday season, but the company hasn’t released any new sales figures since then. “This is the fastest adoption I’ve seen of a new category of hardware, and we’ve done it faster than the normal generational shift of silicon,” James Howell, Microsoft’s VP of Windows marketing, said in a conversation with Engadget. “Copilot+ PCs continue to be a transition that we are pushing for and prioritizing. But I can’t give you the exact numbers beyond that… Just for the last two or three months, we’ve been doing pretty well with year-on-year growth in the Windows business.”
Surface Pro Copilot+
While Microsoft ultimately doesn’t have much to show for the Copilot+ initiative, the steady progression of hardware will lead to AI PCs dominating over the next five years. The research firm Omdia predicts that AI PCs will account for 55 percent of computers shipped in all of 2026, up from 42.5 percent of systems in Q3 2025. By 2029, Omdia predicts AI PCs will make up 75 percent of all systems shipped, giving Windows 80 percent of the AI PC market.
Omdia AI PC shipment predictions
“It’s important to note that this steep adoption curve [for AI PCs] is driven more by the product roadmaps of the PC market, rather than consumers and businesses seeking PCs specifically for AI,” according to Omdia research analyst Kieren Jessop. “For businesses, and consumers especially, AI-capable PC adoption is more a function of a customer going to purchase a device and that device just so happens to have an NPU.”
Microsoft was basically right: AI PCs are the future. But it turns out the AI features people actually want to use — like ChatGPT, Sora and Microsoft’s own Copilot — are mostly powered by the cloud, making onboard NPUs superfluous. That won’t be true forever. There are tangible security, speed and convenience benefits for onboard AI processing, like transcribing sensitive audio instead of sending it to the cloud. But for now, those AI workloads are relatively niche, and they’re not enough to make the Copilot+ a true success by any measure.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/computing/laptops/microsofts-copilot-ai-pc-plan-fizzled-but-it-still-served-a-purpose-130000239.html?src=rss
